The Delta Issue #93
We’re doing too much and too little on school improvement.
Hi all, Kunjan here.
Somewhere over the last few years, talk of improving schools gave way to talk of “School Improvement.”
Lowercase “school improvement” is the daily work of making schools better at the core thing they exist to do: educate kids.
Capital-S, Capital-I “School Improvement” is a federal grant program created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that has since evolved into a tangled bureaucratic web: a School Improvement office inside an agency, a cottage industry of vendors, and a portfolio of SIPs (School Improvement Plans). It runs parallel to other offices also tasked with improving schools—high school, math and literacy, and attendance—but there’s little coordination between them.
Improving schools should not sit in one office or initiative. It should be the work of every office, and the organizing principle behind how state agencies operate.
Federal School Improvement dollars are one of the clearest resources states have to drive instructional improvement in the schools struggling the most. But most states today aren’t using them that way.
This week, I want to make the case for states to stop treating school improvement like a side hustle and instead treat it like their primary mission.
If school improvement isn’t the purpose of the state agency, what is?
During our recent webinar on “The Myth of Local Control”, we debunked the idea that states are powerless to influence what happens in classrooms because local control makes it too complicated.
As Jessica Baghian shared: Local control is real, but it’s not an excuse for states to forfeit their point of view on what strong teaching and learning looks like.
The public expects state education agencies to lead systems, improve outcomes, and make sure kids are learning. If the job were only to transfer money from the feds to districts, five people could do it. The reason state agencies have buildings full of staff is because the work is supposed to be bigger than that.
So how did so many states end up so far from that work?
Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), federal law treated school improvement as its own line item: states had to identify struggling schools, place them into one of a few federally prescribed turnaround models, and use dedicated School Improvement Grant funds to support those efforts. When ESSA replaced NCLB in 2015, the prescribed models went away and states gained flexibility to design their own improvement strategies.
Unfortunately, most states didn’t use that flexibility to integrate school improvement into core academics. They used it to build more around it—needs assessments, improvement plans, monitoring systems, reporting structures, compliance processes—that consumed enormous amounts of time and energy without changing what students were experiencing in classrooms.
What States Get Wrong About School Improvement
The problem with School Improvement stems from four common mistakes:
1️⃣ States make improvement harder, not easier, for struggling schools.
Improving schools is conceptually straightforward: students need stronger instruction, teachers need stronger support, and schools need coherence around what they’re trying to accomplish.
But states have a habit of making improvement more complicated than it needs to be. If a state believes high-quality curriculum, strong teacher training, and extra support for students who struggle, leads to better outcomes, then school improvement should mean doubling down on those things, not layering on a separate theory of change for struggling schools.
2️⃣ States don’t identify enough schools.
Under ESSA, states were required to identify the bottom 5% of schools “in need of improvement” and choose from one of four federally prescribed turnaround models to get them back on track.
But identifying only 5% of schools is not nearly enough when, in many states, far more schools are struggling to deliver strong outcomes for kids, sometimes even a majority. In Louisiana, we took improvement a step further by identifying roughly the bottom 40% of schools. Nearly every district ended up with at least one school on the list, which meant school improvement became a statewide instructional priority and landed on every superintendent’s radar.
3️⃣ States skip districts on the implementation chain.
When a school is identified for improvement, the burden usually falls directly on the school: write the needs assessment, develop the improvement plan, select the interventions, monitor implementation, and report progress. Meanwhile, the district—the part of the system that controls many of the core instructional levers—is left out of the equation entirely.
For school improvement to reach kids in classrooms, the chain has to run state → district → school, with every link doing its part. Schools have to deliver strong instruction every day in every classroom. Districts have to take responsibility for improving their schools. And states have to hold districts accountable for results.
4️⃣ States fund compliance, not improvement.
Federal School Improvement money is specifically intended to help the lowest-performing schools get better. Most states are using the money in exactly the wrong ways.
On one side, states layer extremely cumbersome compliance requirements onto identified schools that do little to move kids toward better outcomes, and that sometimes make real improvement even harder. The dollars effectively pay for the paperwork, not the work.
On the other side, the money itself comes with no strings attached. States are simply distributing School Improvement dollars without requiring anything in return—no expectation that schools adopt high-quality curriculum, invest in teacher training, or build the implementation systems most likely to move the needle for students. The result is that funding flows regardless of the choices schools make, which means the schools doing the right things and the schools doing the wrong things get treated exactly the same.
Funding should be a lever, not a blank check—and states should reserve their School Improvement dollars for schools and districts willing to make the right instructional choices.
Let’s Get Muddy
Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore what it looks like when school improvement runs through everything: how states assess schools, how districts allocate support, how leaders are trained, how success gets recognized and replicated, and how resources are prioritized. Stay tuned.
ICYMI: Watch our webinar on “The Myth of Local Control,” featuring EdTrust CEO Denise Forte , and The Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Mike Petrilli , and our very own Jessica Baghian.
